This isn't malicious. It's just that Macs are more expensive than Windows. For one thing Macs are a computer with an OS, while Windows is just an OS. Moreover Apple charges premium prices for the hardware to run their OS. Macs are more expensive. They are better, but they are more expensive. If you're brave enough to try linux, then you just pay for hardware and get everything worthwhile Mac has to offer.
I once tried to read an Ayn Rand book, but fell asleep after about ten pages. Haven't tried since. I've been told that my views may appear similar to hers but I'll never know because she doesn't appeal to me enough for me to find out. ( Didn't she have some kind of cult? ). Oh well, not every Christian is Jim Jones, and not every me is Ayn Rand.
The idea that 'the strong survive' is a very
simplistic view of evolution. What is strong
today may be a hindrance tomorrow.
It's true. However if you let 'those who survive' define 'strong', then it's an apt description. However 'strong' may actually mean physically weak in certain cases. I do the same thing with 'selfish'. Of course only the selfish survive, because I let survive define selfish. Only the selfish survive. In many cases the most selfish thing to do is to cooperate with others, and do what might even appear to be altruistic. If it were truely altruistic it would be maladaptive because I am using as a definition of selfish behavior: 'behavior that is adaptive'. In biology you define self basically as the genes. For humans who don't think of themselves as merely their genes, this line of reasoning must be revisited. You can't use a completely darwinistic definition of selfish to mesh with the rest of everyday speech. Even though I don't believe in true altruism, I don't shun the word, but I use it to describe behavior that others might call altruistic even if it isn't or isn't depending on definitions.
Once you start using reasoning with words, you can't go too far before the ground becomes too squishy to walk on.
I don't think humanity is an organism the way an individual human is, or even like a beehive sort of is. Humans are a species. I don't think uncooperative humans necessarily harm 'humanity'. They are just part of it.
As for a Bruce Willis adventure, I'll elaborate:
Case 1) I was 'Chosen' by someone to go. If the chance of success were low enough, I might even volunteer just to take a ride on a rocket. If there were significant chance of success, then I would want to stay, and so I'd tell them to fsck off, I don't care, I don't think it will work, and I'm going to get laid. But it would be a bluff. If it seriously looked like nobody else would go, then they would have called my bluff and I would go.
Case 2) If I was a significantly better choice than the next guy or somehow my personal presence was critical, I would go. I'm dead anyways, so no skin off my nose. However I would seriously examine whether or not my ego was about to get me killed. Am I REALLY all that much better than the next guy? Going when you're dead anyway is completely selfish - you sacrifice nothing ( or at most a few weeks of life ) and get a big win gene wise ( most of humanity and even the animals and plants etc have very similar genes to your own, and even if you don't give a damn about that which most including me barely do or don't at all, you get a free spaceship ride. Weeee. And you probably get laid alot in the time just prior to liftoff. And those close to you may be able to play up any fame/noteriety for personal benefit. You might be able to demand payment upfront to be awarded to those close to you.
Society, memes, institutions, corporations and other nonhuman lifeforms which may be endowed with a wierd sort of alien sentience that's hard to relate to, act selfishly if they have the wherewithal to survive. Most of the arrangements humans have with these are at best uneasy symbiosis. When the love affair goes bad, it's usually the humans that lose.
What if the majority wanted to eat me? A plane crashes in antarctica with 30 people, who eventually decide to draw straws for who will be killed and eaten, I don't like this, but am forced to draw, and get the short straw, I quickly grab the dead ( and already eaten ) airmarshal's gun and threaten to shoot the first person that steps toward me. I stay awake, but realise that they'll jump me as soon as I nod off, so I look around and decide to shoot, not the fattest most nutritious person, but the person most intent on my being killed. We eat him. And I'm keeping the gun, and sleeping with one eye open until we freeze starve or are rescued. Fsck the majority.
If
you do not cooperate, you are a cancerous skin lesion that needs to
be cured/removed
You assume that people are essentially selfish. And yet somehow I see
myriads of laws that inconvenience the individual, in order to
benefit the majority. For example, it would be beneficial to simply
steal from others.
Although there are lots of nice things I'd like to pinch, I'm not in favor of repealing antitheivery laws because the negative impact in the long run ( or even the fairly short run ) on me would likely more than cancel out the value of what I would steal. Also, I'd not be able to steal all that much if the anti-stealing laws were repealed since wal-mart would be looted bare in sort order.
I must confess that I WOULD steal millions of dollars if presented with an opportunity to where there would be no chance of getting caught. For instance, If I were suddenly endowed with some superhero powers that would let me get into Fort Knox. However, I've never been faced with an opportunity to steal where the small (or large) risk of getting caught doesn't outweigh any desire I might have to steal. And because the people close to me, certainly friends and family, and even just aquaintances are safe from any potential thievery from me because I value the goodwill of those around me and my reputation more highly than the value of anything they are likely to have for me to steal, - even IF stealing were legal.
Despite being totally OK with stealing in principle - especially from strangers, I've never stolen anything except a toy plastic boot when I was four years old.
I am NOT ok with everyone stealing, and I think thieves should be punished, as long as the thief isn't me. My habit ( I agree with habits=morals ala Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics ) of not stealing stems from practical reasons such as the near impossibility of reliably committing the perfect crime, and the fact that if you keep committing crimes you will eventually get caught, and many other practical considerations.
I didn't say that I advocate the status quo for it's own sake, or because it is the status quo. The status quo is not king, it's just that I find myself agreeing with it often. But the conclusions are made independently.
The world would be better without the non-cooperators? If so, annihilate them - you've done the world a favor ( though not the non-cooperators ). How is that not genocide? Not that you could even identify them as almost anyone would cooperate with a gun to their head.
Damaging the human species? By whose measure, yours?
To clarify my comment about my 'normal' thinking, I find myself usually in favor of the status quo which I wasn't before. Sending ships to clean up the garbage vortex is NOT the status quo. I never find myself longing for a world without a certain group of people.
I have more genes in common with you than I do with a starfish. My genes would probably want me to save your life rather than that of the starfish ( and I would anyway for various other reasons ) if I were ever faced with the choice.
A bee colony with uncooperative workers would be sick as would a person with a cancerous skin lesion. A typical skin cells function is to die and thereby protect the innards with it's corpse, then slough off. It lacks the ability to procreate without the organism it protects. All its eggs are in the one basket of the total you, and it lacks a mind to change. It's basically an automaton. Would I take the Bruce Willis trip to the hypothetical comet to save the human race? Sure, if nobody else was doing it. Even if I didn't think there were much chance of success, there would have to be some pretty wild sex back home on earth, to be cooler than a trip on a rocket. Seriously, I can't imagine nobody else would go, so I'd stay home. There would be an ample hero supply
without me.
I dunno what humans COULD mate with, there are hybrids such as ligers and tigons and jagoleps and mules and hinneys and rutabega etc. There are live mice with human genes used for experiments. There are probably many bacteria with artificially implanted human genes and everyone has genes from viruses that have once upon the human evolutionary past 'mated' with humans or their ancestors. Probably there are snippets from bacterial plasmids in the human genome. I am not an expert but funky shit goes on naturally and more funky shit is suddenly possible with modern technology.
Maybe there shouldn't be. If people had to be on the lookout for fraud, then a reputation would be worth something, and maybe less fraudsters would be successful.
No, my genes don't care about anything, even 'the human genome'. They just want to be passed on. They don't care if I mate with a starfish to do it, as long as the resulting hybrid isn't sterile and has a chance of surviving. That said, I'm sure that the things that I value are somewhat shaped by my genes. My concept of self includes my genes but is not limited to them.
Yes the GP misunderstood, but I wasn't exactly clear. It's a somewhat obscure reference to a quote from the movie Dogma where a demon (of art?) Azrael says: "No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater... than central air" .
I was saying that Central Air Conditioning is dumb ( in the movie, a sin ). Although prohibiting it might be considered a case of Central Air Conditioning in and of itself. Anyway, my chosen interpretation of the movie may not be what the writer intended. I just thought it was funny.
This science has been peer reviewed and stands up to scrutiny. Only
sociopaths act selfishly all the time
I believe there is room for all the human qualities that most people value such as love and cooperation within the rubric of acting selfishly. Acknowledging this is merely an act of intellectual honesty. At least that has been my experience. Life is a survival situation. It's not necessary to emotionally feel this constantly to survive, but it's true - something to keep in the back of your mind. The difference between someone like me and a typical sociopath is that I do value the same things that most humans do, such as love and cooperation, whereas a sociopath may not.
It is perfectly fine to
kill someone who would kill you and everyone you love without any
qualms. It is perfectly fine to
kill someone who would kill you and everyone you love without any
qualms. Heck, we'd be doing society a favor if we wiped out all the
sociopathic non-cooperators rather than letting them take advantage of our good nature.
Hahha, this is the sort of thing that being intellectually honest with yourself helps you avoid. You just advocated some kind of genocide or something... The longer I've held nihilistic assumptions about the world ( 15 or 16 years now? ) the more I've noticed them making me MORE humane and 'normal' in my thinking than I ever was before. Starting with a bad base theory leads to crazy shit via the GIGO principle.
And that's where you're fundamentally wrong. We, a bigbrain species,
actually can rise above our nature.
Brains can not escape nature and become supernatural. If our brains get in the way of our survival and procreation, nature will take our brains back (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy )
Nature is not exclusively 'red in tooth and claw.' Cooperation is at
least as much a part of ecology as competition.
Granted.
Your argument boils down to a classic naturalistic fallacy. Just
because something is a certain way does not mean that is how it
should be, or how it must be. We have brains. We aren't simple
animals. We can predict the consequences of our actions and adjust
our actions accordingly
There's nobody watching from above. If a rogue coment sterilized the surface of the earth tomorrow, nobody would care. ( there would be nobody on earth to care, and likely no aliens around to witness it ). Should a comet hit the earth tomorrow? From my point of view no, but my opinion is irrelevant, one either will or won't. Should I kill and eat a deer? From my point of view, yes, they are yummy, from the deer's pov, no. For me morals depend entirely on your point of view. Sometimes people find common cause and cooperate, but to act as if there is common cause when there is none is asking for a disaster.
If you are in a crowded venue which happens to be on fire and notice that everyone is rushing to the only exit, and realize that most will not get out alive this way even though an orderly exit would mean no deaths are you going to stop rushing to the exit? It won't help you get out alive, even though you have a brain and know the consequences of everyone rushing at the door, you will still rush at the door. If you are nice you'll try not to step on anyone's face on the way. If you try to convince people to stop rushing, they won't hear you above the din, and if you don't rush to the exit your chance of survival goes form ten percent to zero.
We are not desperate
Every day is a matter of life and death though mostly disguised subtly. People have many ways of purposefully forgetting that. Most everyone ( including me ) chooses not to take themselves as seriously as things are. If you didn't relax, you'd certainly choke and fail.
We have enough
resources to give everyone on the planet a decent standard of living.
Who is WE? We aren't in charge - nobody is. Central Air Conditioning.
Finally, we can punish non-cooperation, making it less profitable
than cooperation.
Central Air Conditioning. Some form of this may occur with a We making sure They cooperate. 'They' won't harm OUR environment,and there may not be many of 'Us' so OUR piggish ways won't be too hard on Mother Earth.
In closing, let me just add that I'm glad I don't live in your mental
world. It sounds like a lonely and frightening place.
I'd be far more lonely and frightened if I didn't have a realistic conception of other people and so were unable to relate to them, or an unrealistic conception of the world so as to be liable to be surprised in unfortunate ways by it. I'm actually pretty comfortable with things.
I think that although we know what the consequences will be for non-environmentalism, that knowledge is largely useless. Sure there are national parks, and no littering laws, and restrictions on what can be dumpped in the river and air nowadays, but let's look a bit more closely:
Parks are places that benefit the many more than the few locals who would wish to exploit them. A park's many visitors derive more benefit from having an unspoilt area to visit than the few locals who would use that land for logging, grazing, or who would build mansions on the beach there. Most importantly, these areas are where the voting *power* of the many overwhelms the money power of those who have it to spend. The monetary value of the use of a piece of land is less than the desire of the public to use that land as park.
No littering laws. The cost of not littering is basically the effort of carrying your trash to a trashcan. In other words it's very low to free.
Pollution restrictions: Pollution lowers the standard of living for those nearby. It's junk in the air, smelly water, seeping cancer chemicals etc. When other economic activity dwarfs a particularly bad polluter, then the harm done to the area by the polluter results in the balance of power shifting away from let's keep them here at all costs, to they better clean up or they can close down for all I care. Whatever they were doing gets shifted to where there is nothing going on ( the developing world ). Out in the boonies, you can pollute and the locals love you because you are paying them more than they've ever been paid before.
The developed world's pollution restrictions largely amount to this sort of thing - making the place nice so that people involved in other more lucrative (at least in sum) economic persuits are happy. Catalytic converters are required everywhere but are largely for cityfolk.
In the end no less pollution happens. It just gets moved from the rich areas to the poor ones. Fines keep people from littering, and because the benefit is great and the cost is tiny nobody complains to have the fines repealed. If there were any serious effort to stop pollution there would be severe economic consequences. Imagine paying fines with every piece of wal-mart junk you buy because of the pollution in it's manufacture? Not gonna happen. It would be shooting oneself in the foot. And it shouldn't happen, because someone else would arise to not make the same mistake of trying to implement Central Air Conditioning.
I could have reasonably not noticed that the ATM gave me an extra 20 instead of a 10, and then gone on and spent it. If it's gone, then allowing the company to claw it back from me has damaged me by screwing up my finances. ( now I owe them 10 bucks. ) If I were a judge and the customer sued the ATM company for lying to him about how much money he had withdrawn by giving him too much money, I would award damages to the ATM customer of 10 bucks nullifying the clawback. Increase the amounts involved ( say a bank error ) to any sub-million dollar amount and my decision is likely to remain the same.
I don't see why the AP shouldn't be able to CLAIM that someone can't do X with a work ( even if it's in the public domain ). I can claim to be a Voodoo Shaman and to have put a hex on you that will cause you to die of Creeping Nematodes. It's a free country. I can claim anything I want. I can claim I am an intergalactic space bunny with a glowing fuzzy penis if I want to.
In a way it feels like we are crapping our own pants
because we have more important things to do than go to the toilet.
We are doing just that, in the same way as we might do if chased by a lion. We'd crap our pants because when a lion's chasing you up a tree, you have more important things to do than go to the toilet.
If some country were to spend megabucks to clean this up then they wouldn't be spending those megabucks on infrastructure needed to compete economically with the other countries. Because the competition never sleeps, it's better to crap your pants and run as fast as you can. If you're too good to pollute, then there's someone waiting in the wings to do your pollution for you.
Humans make their living FROM the environment, not FOR it. We aren't as a species gardeners of nature, we like the rest of species, are part of nature which means we don't have the luxury of being 'environmentalists'. Personally, if I can gain by polluting more than the pollution itself harms me personally, I not only will, but I must. It's part of the duty I feel to try hard.
When the environment can't support humans at their current lifestyle then less humans will live ( mostly ) less well. ( or more humans will live very much less well ). If humans don't like that, they will kill each other until they come to some sort of arrangement. It's inevitable. The best you can do is be the one who in the end is living the best and not being killed.
I'm thinking of what happened to my brother. He couldn't qualify physically for his job as a security guard because he couldn't run the mile in under X minutes. He was diagnosed with tendonitis, and let go until he recovered. He didn't recover, and was subsequently diagnosed with a clot in his leg that didn't give it sufficient blood supply ( it wasn't tendonitis ). He had to get a stent in his leg and has no insurance. He should be able to get his job back now that his leg is fixed, but he did not have insurance during the bulk of his treatment for the issue that lost him his job even though he had decent insurance through his employer.
TFA says the bomb hits at twice the speed of sound. I always thought terminal velocity was about 125 mph though I did some reading and it turns out that terminal velocity depends on density. Well duh, I mean a packing peanut isn't very dense and falls much slower than a pencil, but somehow I thought all these years without thinking about it that 'terminal velocity' for reasonably dense things was a constant. I just never thought about it, but now I feel quite stupid. Anyways, the point I was getting to was that maybe they should drop slugs of metal from space with a heat sheild or something to prevent them from burning up in the atmosphere. That would be kewl, huuhuhuh
Well even if sick days don't come out of your vacation time, they do if you're smart. You don't want to use more sick days than you have. If for instance, you get a disease and can't work because of it, you might be fired and so lose your health insurance which you need because you're deathly ill.
I don't know, it could be a debian thing since I installed emacs from a.deb. But whatever... It seems odd that the rest of emacs is installed outside of/usr/local whilst some parts are in/usr/local. It seems almost like an artefact of the emacs installation process that made it into the.deb.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't malicious. It's just that Macs are more expensive than Windows. For one thing Macs are a computer with an OS, while Windows is just an OS. Moreover Apple charges premium prices for the hardware to run their OS. Macs are more expensive. They are better, but they are more expensive. If you're brave enough to try linux, then you just pay for hardware and get everything worthwhile Mac has to offer.
I once tried to read an Ayn Rand book, but fell asleep after about ten pages. Haven't tried since. I've been told that my views may appear similar to hers but I'll never know because she doesn't appeal to me enough for me to find out. ( Didn't she have some kind of cult? ). Oh well, not every Christian is Jim Jones, and not every me is Ayn Rand.
It's true. However if you let 'those who survive' define 'strong', then it's an apt description. However 'strong' may actually mean physically weak in certain cases. I do the same thing with 'selfish'. Of course only the selfish survive, because I let survive define selfish. Only the selfish survive. In many cases the most selfish thing to do is to cooperate with others, and do what might even appear to be altruistic. If it were truely altruistic it would be maladaptive because I am using as a definition of selfish behavior: 'behavior that is adaptive'. In biology you define self basically as the genes. For humans who don't think of themselves as merely their genes, this line of reasoning must be revisited. You can't use a completely darwinistic definition of selfish to mesh with the rest of everyday speech. Even though I don't believe in true altruism, I don't shun the word, but I use it to describe behavior that others might call altruistic even if it isn't or isn't depending on definitions. Once you start using reasoning with words, you can't go too far before the ground becomes too squishy to walk on.
I don't think humanity is an organism the way an individual human is, or even like a beehive sort of is. Humans are a species. I don't think uncooperative humans necessarily harm 'humanity'. They are just part of it.
As for a Bruce Willis adventure, I'll elaborate:
Case 1) I was 'Chosen' by someone to go. If the chance of success were low enough, I might even volunteer just to take a ride on a rocket. If there were significant chance of success, then I would want to stay, and so I'd tell them to fsck off, I don't care, I don't think it will work, and I'm going to get laid. But it would be a bluff. If it seriously looked like nobody else would go, then they would have called my bluff and I would go.
Case 2) If I was a significantly better choice than the next guy or somehow my personal presence was critical, I would go. I'm dead anyways, so no skin off my nose. However I would seriously examine whether or not my ego was about to get me killed. Am I REALLY all that much better than the next guy? Going when you're dead anyway is completely selfish - you sacrifice nothing ( or at most a few weeks of life ) and get a big win gene wise ( most of humanity and even the animals and plants etc have very similar genes to your own, and even if you don't give a damn about that which most including me barely do or don't at all, you get a free spaceship ride. Weeee. And you probably get laid alot in the time just prior to liftoff. And those close to you may be able to play up any fame/noteriety for personal benefit. You might be able to demand payment upfront to be awarded to those close to you.
Society, memes, institutions, corporations and other nonhuman lifeforms which may be endowed with a wierd sort of alien sentience that's hard to relate to, act selfishly if they have the wherewithal to survive. Most of the arrangements humans have with these are at best uneasy symbiosis. When the love affair goes bad, it's usually the humans that lose.
What if the majority wanted to eat me? A plane crashes in antarctica with 30 people, who eventually decide to draw straws for who will be killed and eaten, I don't like this, but am forced to draw, and get the short straw, I quickly grab the dead ( and already eaten ) airmarshal's gun and threaten to shoot the first person that steps toward me. I stay awake, but realise that they'll jump me as soon as I nod off, so I look around and decide to shoot, not the fattest most nutritious person, but the person most intent on my being killed. We eat him. And I'm keeping the gun, and sleeping with one eye open until we freeze starve or are rescued. Fsck the majority.
I'll cooperate mine fuhrer.
Although there are lots of nice things I'd like to pinch, I'm not in favor of repealing antitheivery laws because the negative impact in the long run ( or even the fairly short run ) on me would likely more than cancel out the value of what I would steal. Also, I'd not be able to steal all that much if the anti-stealing laws were repealed since wal-mart would be looted bare in sort order.
I must confess that I WOULD steal millions of dollars if presented with an opportunity to where there would be no chance of getting caught. For instance, If I were suddenly endowed with some superhero powers that would let me get into Fort Knox. However, I've never been faced with an opportunity to steal where the small (or large) risk of getting caught doesn't outweigh any desire I might have to steal. And because the people close to me, certainly friends and family, and even just aquaintances are safe from any potential thievery from me because I value the goodwill of those around me and my reputation more highly than the value of anything they are likely to have for me to steal, - even IF stealing were legal.
Despite being totally OK with stealing in principle - especially from strangers, I've never stolen anything except a toy plastic boot when I was four years old.
I am NOT ok with everyone stealing, and I think thieves should be punished, as long as the thief isn't me. My habit ( I agree with habits=morals ala Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics ) of not stealing stems from practical reasons such as the near impossibility of reliably committing the perfect crime, and the fact that if you keep committing crimes you will eventually get caught, and many other practical considerations.
I didn't say that I advocate the status quo for it's own sake, or because it is the status quo. The status quo is not king, it's just that I find myself agreeing with it often. But the conclusions are made independently.
The world would be better without the non-cooperators? If so, annihilate them - you've done the world a favor ( though not the non-cooperators ). How is that not genocide? Not that you could even identify them as almost anyone would cooperate with a gun to their head.
Damaging the human species? By whose measure, yours?
To clarify my comment about my 'normal' thinking, I find myself usually in favor of the status quo which I wasn't before. Sending ships to clean up the garbage vortex is NOT the status quo. I never find myself longing for a world without a certain group of people.
A bee colony with uncooperative workers would be sick as would a person with a cancerous skin lesion. A typical skin cells function is to die and thereby protect the innards with it's corpse, then slough off. It lacks the ability to procreate without the organism it protects. All its eggs are in the one basket of the total you, and it lacks a mind to change. It's basically an automaton. Would I take the Bruce Willis trip to the hypothetical comet to save the human race? Sure, if nobody else was doing it. Even if I didn't think there were much chance of success, there would have to be some pretty wild sex back home on earth, to be cooler than a trip on a rocket. Seriously, I can't imagine nobody else would go, so I'd stay home. There would be an ample hero supply without me.
I dunno what humans COULD mate with, there are hybrids such as ligers and tigons and jagoleps and mules and hinneys and rutabega etc. There are live mice with human genes used for experiments. There are probably many bacteria with artificially implanted human genes and everyone has genes from viruses that have once upon the human evolutionary past 'mated' with humans or their ancestors. Probably there are snippets from bacterial plasmids in the human genome. I am not an expert but funky shit goes on naturally and more funky shit is suddenly possible with modern technology.
Maybe there shouldn't be. If people had to be on the lookout for fraud, then a reputation would be worth something, and maybe less fraudsters would be successful.
No, my genes don't care about anything, even 'the human genome'. They just want to be passed on. They don't care if I mate with a starfish to do it, as long as the resulting hybrid isn't sterile and has a chance of surviving. That said, I'm sure that the things that I value are somewhat shaped by my genes. My concept of self includes my genes but is not limited to them.
Yes the GP misunderstood, but I wasn't exactly clear. It's a somewhat obscure reference to a quote from the movie Dogma where a demon (of art?) Azrael says: "No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater... than central air" . I was saying that Central Air Conditioning is dumb ( in the movie, a sin ). Although prohibiting it might be considered a case of Central Air Conditioning in and of itself. Anyway, my chosen interpretation of the movie may not be what the writer intended. I just thought it was funny.
I believe there is room for all the human qualities that most people value such as love and cooperation within the rubric of acting selfishly. Acknowledging this is merely an act of intellectual honesty. At least that has been my experience. Life is a survival situation. It's not necessary to emotionally feel this constantly to survive, but it's true - something to keep in the back of your mind. The difference between someone like me and a typical sociopath is that I do value the same things that most humans do, such as love and cooperation, whereas a sociopath may not.
Hahha, this is the sort of thing that being intellectually honest with yourself helps you avoid. You just advocated some kind of genocide or something... The longer I've held nihilistic assumptions about the world ( 15 or 16 years now? ) the more I've noticed them making me MORE humane and 'normal' in my thinking than I ever was before. Starting with a bad base theory leads to crazy shit via the GIGO principle.
Do you think that people will ever cease to seek to profit? I doubt it.
Brains can not escape nature and become supernatural. If our brains get in the way of our survival and procreation, nature will take our brains back (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy )
Granted.
There's nobody watching from above. If a rogue coment sterilized the surface of the earth tomorrow, nobody would care. ( there would be nobody on earth to care, and likely no aliens around to witness it ). Should a comet hit the earth tomorrow? From my point of view no, but my opinion is irrelevant, one either will or won't. Should I kill and eat a deer? From my point of view, yes, they are yummy, from the deer's pov, no. For me morals depend entirely on your point of view. Sometimes people find common cause and cooperate, but to act as if there is common cause when there is none is asking for a disaster.
If you are in a crowded venue which happens to be on fire and notice that everyone is rushing to the only exit, and realize that most will not get out alive this way even though an orderly exit would mean no deaths are you going to stop rushing to the exit? It won't help you get out alive, even though you have a brain and know the consequences of everyone rushing at the door, you will still rush at the door. If you are nice you'll try not to step on anyone's face on the way. If you try to convince people to stop rushing, they won't hear you above the din, and if you don't rush to the exit your chance of survival goes form ten percent to zero.
Every day is a matter of life and death though mostly disguised subtly. People have many ways of purposefully forgetting that. Most everyone ( including me ) chooses not to take themselves as seriously as things are. If you didn't relax, you'd certainly choke and fail.
Who is WE? We aren't in charge - nobody is. Central Air Conditioning.
Central Air Conditioning. Some form of this may occur with a We making sure They cooperate. 'They' won't harm OUR environment,and there may not be many of 'Us' so OUR piggish ways won't be too hard on Mother Earth.
I'd be far more lonely and frightened if I didn't have a realistic conception of other people and so were unable to relate to them, or an unrealistic conception of the world so as to be liable to be surprised in unfortunate ways by it. I'm actually pretty comfortable with things.
Parks are places that benefit the many more than the few locals who would wish to exploit them. A park's many visitors derive more benefit from having an unspoilt area to visit than the few locals who would use that land for logging, grazing, or who would build mansions on the beach there. Most importantly, these areas are where the voting *power* of the many overwhelms the money power of those who have it to spend. The monetary value of the use of a piece of land is less than the desire of the public to use that land as park.
No littering laws. The cost of not littering is basically the effort of carrying your trash to a trashcan. In other words it's very low to free.
Pollution restrictions: Pollution lowers the standard of living for those nearby. It's junk in the air, smelly water, seeping cancer chemicals etc. When other economic activity dwarfs a particularly bad polluter, then the harm done to the area by the polluter results in the balance of power shifting away from let's keep them here at all costs, to they better clean up or they can close down for all I care. Whatever they were doing gets shifted to where there is nothing going on ( the developing world ). Out in the boonies, you can pollute and the locals love you because you are paying them more than they've ever been paid before.
The developed world's pollution restrictions largely amount to this sort of thing - making the place nice so that people involved in other more lucrative (at least in sum) economic persuits are happy. Catalytic converters are required everywhere but are largely for cityfolk.
In the end no less pollution happens. It just gets moved from the rich areas to the poor ones. Fines keep people from littering, and because the benefit is great and the cost is tiny nobody complains to have the fines repealed. If there were any serious effort to stop pollution there would be severe economic consequences. Imagine paying fines with every piece of wal-mart junk you buy because of the pollution in it's manufacture? Not gonna happen. It would be shooting oneself in the foot. And it shouldn't happen, because someone else would arise to not make the same mistake of trying to implement Central Air Conditioning.
I could have reasonably not noticed that the ATM gave me an extra 20 instead of a 10, and then gone on and spent it. If it's gone, then allowing the company to claw it back from me has damaged me by screwing up my finances. ( now I owe them 10 bucks. ) If I were a judge and the customer sued the ATM company for lying to him about how much money he had withdrawn by giving him too much money, I would award damages to the ATM customer of 10 bucks nullifying the clawback. Increase the amounts involved ( say a bank error ) to any sub-million dollar amount and my decision is likely to remain the same.
I don't see why the AP shouldn't be able to CLAIM that someone can't do X with a work ( even if it's in the public domain ). I can claim to be a Voodoo Shaman and to have put a hex on you that will cause you to die of Creeping Nematodes. It's a free country. I can claim anything I want. I can claim I am an intergalactic space bunny with a glowing fuzzy penis if I want to.
We are doing just that, in the same way as we might do if chased by a lion. We'd crap our pants because when a lion's chasing you up a tree, you have more important things to do than go to the toilet.
If some country were to spend megabucks to clean this up then they wouldn't be spending those megabucks on infrastructure needed to compete economically with the other countries. Because the competition never sleeps, it's better to crap your pants and run as fast as you can. If you're too good to pollute, then there's someone waiting in the wings to do your pollution for you.
Humans make their living FROM the environment, not FOR it. We aren't as a species gardeners of nature, we like the rest of species, are part of nature which means we don't have the luxury of being 'environmentalists'. Personally, if I can gain by polluting more than the pollution itself harms me personally, I not only will, but I must. It's part of the duty I feel to try hard.
When the environment can't support humans at their current lifestyle then less humans will live ( mostly ) less well. ( or more humans will live very much less well ). If humans don't like that, they will kill each other until they come to some sort of arrangement. It's inevitable. The best you can do is be the one who in the end is living the best and not being killed.
Is it possible it's so complicated that stuff will keep breaking faster than they can ever fix it?
I'm thinking of what happened to my brother. He couldn't qualify physically for his job as a security guard because he couldn't run the mile in under X minutes. He was diagnosed with tendonitis, and let go until he recovered. He didn't recover, and was subsequently diagnosed with a clot in his leg that didn't give it sufficient blood supply ( it wasn't tendonitis ). He had to get a stent in his leg and has no insurance. He should be able to get his job back now that his leg is fixed, but he did not have insurance during the bulk of his treatment for the issue that lost him his job even though he had decent insurance through his employer.
TFA says the bomb hits at twice the speed of sound. I always thought terminal velocity was about 125 mph though I did some reading and it turns out that terminal velocity depends on density. Well duh, I mean a packing peanut isn't very dense and falls much slower than a pencil, but somehow I thought all these years without thinking about it that 'terminal velocity' for reasonably dense things was a constant. I just never thought about it, but now I feel quite stupid. Anyways, the point I was getting to was that maybe they should drop slugs of metal from space with a heat sheild or something to prevent them from burning up in the atmosphere. That would be kewl, huuhuhuh
Well even if sick days don't come out of your vacation time, they do if you're smart. You don't want to use more sick days than you have. If for instance, you get a disease and can't work because of it, you might be fired and so lose your health insurance which you need because you're deathly ill.
I don't know, it could be a debian thing since I installed emacs from a .deb. But whatever... It seems odd that the rest of emacs is installed outside of /usr/local whilst some parts are in /usr/local. It seems almost like an artefact of the emacs installation process that made it into the .deb.